Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022

7 May-23 Jul 2022

BXBY, 2022, Still. Credit: Soojin Chang, BXBY, 2022. (Still). Image courtesy of the artist.

Overview

The Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 premieres two newly commissioned moving-image installations by early-career artists Soojin Chang and Michael., the recipients of the eighth edition of the awards.

Soojin Chang’s BXBY is a year-long performance project that merges forms of semi-fictional documentary and ritual practice, that follows Chang as a hybrid, shape-shifting being trying to learn to reproduce. Drawing from chimeric figures within creation stories of the British Isles and the diasporic cultures of Chang and her collaborators (Choulay Mech, Jade ‘o’ Belle, Anika Ahuja, and Aditya Surya Taruna a.k.a Kasimyn), Chang positions her own hybrid body – part animal, part woman, part alien – as a site of technological interaction and as a locus of ongoing experiment. Sampling diverse scientific methods such as IVF, biohacking, and voluntary self-touch, BXBY subverts the hauntings of colonial science to open out into wider affirmation of queer, interspecies kinship and reliance. From this position, BXBY aims to spur a purposeful discussion on notions of sacrifice, animality, objecthood and in/visibility; looking in particular to animist techniques of embodying and remembering.

Michael.’s cleave to the BLACK echoes the art-historical tradition of the painted triptych in a three-screen video projection that offers a panoramic perspective on the legacies of the past that continue to leave an indelible mark on contemporary Black male experience. Alluding to episodes from the Bible and stories from African folklore and cosmology, the piece brings a subtle overtone of parable and myth to its carefully composed and quietly haunting scenes. Looping sequences of a procession of figures slowly climbing an outdoor staircase in a regulation council block are contrasted with a tableau of those figures sleeping (at nightly peace or at final rest). In between is a third screen depicting an arcadian landscape – a memory of a time long gone or a glimmer of better things to come? Far from a vision of utopia or a fantasy of paradise, it feels more like a space that is being reimagined and remade, from the bottom up. Moving through a series of gradually unfolding transitions, in its deliberate, meditative pace, the piece celebrates slowness as a precondition of recovery and care and also as a lens through which the movements of the Black body attain a distinctive state of poise and grace. Made in close dialogue with a group of Black men from different London communities, cleave to the Black is a work of authentic, personal expression and evocative, atmospheric poetry.

Following a nationwide call for applications at the beginning of 2020, each selected artist was awarded £25,000 to develop a significant new moving-image work with Film and Video Umbrella (FVU) for exhibition at Jerwood Arts and Leeds Art Gallery.

Selectors: Hetain Patel, artist; Rehana Zaman, artist; Susanna Chisholm, Programme Development Director, FVU; Harriet Cooper, Head of Visual Arts, Jerwood Arts; Holly Grange, Exhibitions Curator, Leeds Art Gallery.

The Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 are a collaboration between Jerwood Arts and Film and Video Umbrella, in a new partnership with Leeds Art Gallery. They were established in 2012 in response to a need for significant major commissions for early-career moving-image artists, the awards contribute to an ongoing dialogue around urgent or timely concerns within moving-image.

Find out more about the past editions of the Jerwood/FVU Awards, here.

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Press

Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 | Press Release
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